Protection Orders Aren’t an Easy Fix for the Traumatized
I work in low-income housing, providing supportive services to residents at building in Denver with 114 apartments, most of which are part of the Section 8 program, and so affordable for those with the very lowest incomes.
Many of our residents have terrible substance abuse disorders. Almost, if not all of our residents have significant trauma in their past, usually many different incidents. Many were raised in a situation of sustained, inescapable trauma. Some of them have traumatic brain injuries, which still impact them, years later.
Despite all this, most residents are not violent towards me or our property manager. However, recently we have had an exception. We have both been explicitly threatened, subject to verbal abuse and slurs, and chased into our offices. Given some changes to Denver law recently, heavily favoring tenant’s rights, unfortunately sometimes at the expense of other tenants and staff, it is simply faster, not to mention easier, to non-renew this person’s lease, rather than pursue an eviction.
So we have been waiting for the end of the month, when the lease is up and we can change the locks and deactivate the door fob. However, while we were waiting, the person came to the property manager’s door when we both happened to be in her office. He pounded on the door, again shouting abuse and slurs at the top of his lungs. We called the police, as we have for all the incidents. But this time, he had some small outstanding warrants, so they actually took him away. One of the officers came back into the building to warn us that he would likely be out in a few days, and we should get a protection order. It was the first time I felt I had been taken at all seriously by the police.
We advise residents to get protection orders all the time. It gives the property the ability to act to prevent violence and harassment without violating someone’s rights. It also means that, if the police are called, but don’t witness an incident, they still have legal grounds to arrest a perpetrator.
Protection orders are important. And almost none of our residents ever actually follow through to get them. Before this, I knew their reasons at an intellectual level. I have a much better understanding of them now.
People with substance use disorders have impaired cognitive function. It is less well known that people with trauma histories also have impaired cognitive function. Trauma takes your prefrontal cortex off line. That’s where you make long term plans, strategize, reason things through, and crucially, where you control your impulses. Trauma also supercharges the amygdala, the seat of your emotional and fight, flight, or freeze responses.
Of course, this is happening during the trauma, when you need your gut responses to be on turbo, don’t have time to run things through to check for rationality, and shouldn’t control your impulses.
But for many people, it doesn’t stop happening after the traumatic incident is past.
Do you know someone who seems to overreact to a dirty look, getting ready to fight or overly despondent? Someone who can’t seem to stop themselves when they have an impulse? Someone who can’t seem to get it together in life and make plans for the future? Someone who seems to be constantly finding themselves in dodgy situations?
If so, there is a good chance that the person has at least one significant trauma in their background. And, because of the poor executive function of someone who’s prefrontal cortex isn’t working right, one trauma significantly predisposes a person to experience more.
Knowing all this, I started the process of applying for a protection order with an eye for what the process might look and feel like for one of our residents.
The first step was to find, print, and fill out paperwork from the internet. A petition must be filed before 9am, Monday — Friday. I assume that you can get the paperwork at the court building itself, but I correctly determined that getting there at 8am and trying to find and fill out the paperwork before the deadline was not realistic. It most likely would have meant having to come back the next morning, and another day and night without a temporary protection order. Not a big deal in my situation, but dangerous in other situations.
Downloading the forms from the internet was simple for me. Printing them was simple for me. Filling them out was a little more difficult. They ask you describe incidents in detail with specifics, but they don’t give you very much space to do it.
All of these things would have been a great deal more difficult for most of my residents. Few of them have computers, let alone printers. We have a community computer and printer available, but the computer is so raddled with viruses and PUP’s it is almost impossible to use. We haven’t yet worked out a way to keep that from happening, except to replace it with a Chrome machine, which we haven’t been able to do yet. People who don’t understand computers frequently go on printing sprees, so a working printer with paper and toner is far from guaranteed. The only other option for most of my residents would be a trip to the library.
And all that is before trying to fill out the paperwork. Many people with low incomes have an undiagnosed learning disability. Many had childhoods that made it difficult to prioritize school and learning. And so many of them simply don’t process written language very well. This doesn’t mean they aren’t smart, just that reading and writing isn’t their métier. If filling out the forms was minorly challenging for me, imagine how difficult it might be for someone who struggles with reading comprehension and writing in full sentences. I’m sure many people get this far and give up in frustration.
But if you do get that far, the next step is to get to the court building. We’re lucky in that our building is on a bus route. The busses don’t run very early or very late into the evening, which is a problem for people doing shift work, but getting to court in the morning is only two busses and about half an hour. It is also probably your best bet. Finding parking near the court is very difficult. And all this presupposes you have bus money and/or gas and meter money. It doesn’t sound like much of an expense, but if your income is low enough, it can be prohibitive.
The court itself is designed to be imposing. Just being there and going through the security checkpoint to get in is stressful. If someone has had a bad experience with the law, it’s going to be triggering, and being triggered further degrades executive function and exacerbates emotional reactivity.
I was, being me, running later than I had planned, and I didn’t have much time to spare. The website had buried the lede in terms of telling you where and when to go. I got frustrated trying to find out that I needed to be in Courtroom 159 before 9am. And I got even more frustrated trying to find the courtroom. They have a lovely little touchscreen panel in the wall by the elevators that is the building directory. But a search for protection order didn’t turn up any results. Nothing jumped out at me in the index view. I had to find the building floor plan view, and then find out that the main entrance is actually on the second floor, and then find the stairs.
This was annoying for me. But for someone with a bad trauma history, who is likely already triggered, it would have been vastly disproportionately frustrating. I got my paperwork in to the clerk at 8:59. She turned away at least two people after me.
Take a moment to imagine going through all this, then being turned away because you showed up one minute late.
Then pretend that you have this experience after a long travel day, where you showed for an early am flight, which got delayed and was overbooked, then had to book it to make a connecting flight, which then sat on the tarmac for an hour. The flights were long, and you are tired, dehydrated, and hungry. You feel like you are ready to cry when your baggage doesn’t appear on the carousel.
Just living in poverty creates this sort of attenuated exhaustion every day.
If you do make it on time, you have half an hour to kill before court starts. Presumably this is for the judge to review the petitions quickly before taking the bench. I was very lucky to get in on a day when there only two other cases that had filed on time. Nevertheless, the start time of 9:30am passed with no one coming out from the offices behind the bench. 9:45 passed. It was almost 10:00 when the judge finally appeared.
I was lucky again. I was first up. I had to step to the podium between the defense and prosecution tables, where the judge swore me in and interrogated me. She wasn’t aggressive or even unpleasant about it, but it was an interrogation, nonetheless. I had to tell my story again, and this time with the other people on the docket listening in. I could only imagine how it would feel to relive something far more traumatic or personal on a busier day, with a full audience of bored strangers listening on the benches behind you.
Just standing at the podium in front of a judge can be intimidating. It doesn’t bother me now, but I remember what it was like the first time I had to do it as a teenager. It was nothing, I just had to enter my guilty plea on a speeding ticket. But I had never had to deal with the law before, and I was so anxious I almost cried.
The judge had to decide if I was in immediate danger. For the first time, it occurred to me that the harassing and threatening behavior might not be enough. It seemed straightforward to me, but the judge asked so many questions!
Since the man in question was still on a lease, I didn’t expect the court to deny him access to the building. When the judge finally decided that he was, in fact, an immediate danger, she settled on a restraining order that said he has to stay 100 yards away from me at all times. I was fine with this, since there are other access doors to the building, and no one actually has to pass by my office.
I was told to go sit down on some chairs along the side of the courtroom outside the clerk’s office. At least they were padded, as opposed to the pews where we had waited for the judge. However, there was another person sitting to the judge’s side. She wasn’t the recorder or the clerk who sat a step below the judge with a computer and a printer. Was she a law clerk? Another judge? She wasn’t in robes. She sat in the judge’s box, at the same height as the judge, a little behind her, and they kept having whispered conferences.
After I sat down to wait for my paperwork, they whispered to one another for a bit, and the judge beckoned me back up to the podium. Evidently, though she couldn’t forbid the man access to his apartment, the mysterious person with whom she conferred informed or confirmed that she did have legal power to specify that he only use a particular entrance. We settled on one where he was less likely to run into me, and I sat down again.
Of course I listened as the next person came to the podium and started telling her story. How could I not?
After a while, the clerk came out and whispered to me that I should go pay, and bring back the receipt, and she would have my paperwork ready. And that brings up the payment aspect of this. It costs $85 to file for a restraining order in Denver. Most of my resident’s don’t have immediate access to $85. They can’t put it on a credit card, or borrow it from someone, or use their food stamps for it.
In some cases, the judge will bill the cost to the perpetrator. I’m sure with many perpetrators, it is impossible to collect, which is presumably why they have elected to charge the victims.
You can get a waiver. The clerk gave me the paperwork to fill out. Do you know the value of your vehicle off the top of your head? How about the license plates of all the cars in your household? You probably have a pretty good idea of what you make in a month, but how about the income of anyone else in your household? How much do you spend on groceries? Clothing? What is your average utility bill?
I assumed I make too much money, and gave up. I put it on the company card, anyway.
By the time I got back, two thick packets of paper awaited me, one for me to carry with me at all times, the other to be served to the defendant. By then I had forgotten that I should have asked for more copies, at least one extra to keep in the office.
The clerk said I was free to go, but I wasn’t done yet. I still had to get the second packet served to the guy. You can have the papers served by a professional server, by the sheriff, or by anyone over 18 who understands the rules of serving legal documents. Since the guy was still in jail, I’m pretty sure I had to use the sheriff, and I probably would have, anyway.
The sheriff keeps an office just across the street from the courts, in another government building. Unfortunately, by this time, my meter was almost up. I drove around for 10 minutes trying to find another parking place, then had to go through security again and ask for directions.
The admin staff at the sheriff’s office were quick and efficient, and, though any contact with law enforcement can trigger people with traumatic past experiences, there wasn’t anything particularly likely to cause distress. Except that they only accept cash or check. Cash or check. In 2019. Seriously? Fortunately, I had enough to cover the almost $40 fee. This time, there was no paperwork to fill out for a waiver. If you didn’t have $40, too bad for you.
The whole process ate up a morning. If it hadn’t been a light docket, it could have been much more. Not a big deal for me, but for someone working for a big box store or fast food restaurant, it would have meant significant lost income, and if the boss wanted to be jerk, it could have put their job in jeopardy.
And to put the icing on the cake, this is a temporary restraining order. If I want to make it permanent, I have to go back at 10:30 on the 3rd with evidence, and possibly witnesses. Once this person is moved out, I have my doubts that he is organized enough to come back to the property. I haven’t yet decided if it will be worth my time to make it permanent.
The process left me tired and grumpy, and a great deal more tuned in to what an awful lot we are really asking of traumatized people when the police, the landlord, and/or the caseworker says, with casual aplomb, “you just need to get a restraining order.” There were so many points where someone with the limited wherewithal and hyperreactive emotional system of trauma brain would have simply given up. I’m not sure how it can be made better without a lot of taxpayer investment, but anyone who advocates getting a restraining order at least needs to be aware that it isn’t such a simple and cut and dried thing.
